Thoughts on Serenity

Well, it's good to get back to this blogging thing--I appreciate your comments and hope that you enjoy at least some of this. If not, I hope I can at least help pass the time a little bit more quickly.

More from the Thailand trip in a little bit, but first, some thoughts on Serenity, a movie I recently had the opportunity to watch with my in-laws and wife.

I'm glad that I knew that this was a TV show at one time--I guess the creator of the show had a falling-out with Fox TV, who originally aired it as Firefly, but chopped up the order of the series, as well as airing it in a different time slot every week. Knowing that it was a TV show helped excuse, for me, some of the somewhat wooden acting of the principals, particularly the captain. At one point, my wife leaned over and said, "He could use some charisma, huh?"

My thoughts exactly.

What stuck with me was not the story, or the characters, or even stilted acting (all thoughts in the intro aside), but the settings. The movie, for me, did a wonderful job of creating a sense of place and time that is or was different from my own. I think that was the allure of the movie, thinking about the different settings and worlds, imagining what other kinds of things could be happening in a setting like the one in the movie.

Some movies are about character--As Good As it Gets is a great example. That movie had nothing else going for it except the snappily written characters and the actors who brought them to life. Well, that and a cute little dog.

Some movies are about plot--Sahara is the best recent example I can think of that did this well. Sahara or The Mummy--these movies drive you along with them, making you think and wonder what will happen next, tying it all up in the expected way, and making you feel good about what you just saw and participated in, without a lot of committment, kind of like a game of Pac-Man or Crazy Eights.

Serenity was about setting--different worlds, different technologies, even a different way of speaking that, in some ways, helped create versimilitude (sp?) that affected my inner eye in a profound way. I've started to write a book (again) but this time, I'm trying to actually finish it before I start, rather than just writing a chapter and getting stuck. It's that sense of setting, that sense of place, that I'd like to try to convey in my book, even though it's a completely different place and time (it's going to be a high fantasy-type story, something like A Game of Thrones but less depressing). To that end, the movie was valuable and instructive.

I'll see if I can post some of the book here at the blog, if you're interested.

BillG

Currently reading: "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," Madeline L'Engle